Millennials To Be The Most High-Maintenance In The Workplace

You may have clicked on this headline because you expected a simple explanation for a simple thesis. The truth is much more complicated — and also much more fun.

Yes, it’s true. Researchers have been studying millennials for a while now and have come to the conclusion that, as drivers of the workforce, they might become the most “high-maintenance” generation the world has ever seen. But the trade-off for, or perhaps a consequence of, that reality is that millennials are also widely expected to become the most productive generation, too.

Many Generation-Xers have taken to labeling millennials as “coddled,” but most of those same folks don’t think twice about traveling by automobiles on paved roads and visiting the local pharmacy when they feel ill. Every generation is almost inevitably in store for a more “comfortable” go of it than the previous generation. If that wasn’t the case, we might be doing something grievously wrong.

The point is, it’s not “coddled” for millennials to expect meaningful compensation in exchange for meaningful work. And, increasingly, “compensation” goes far beyond a paycheck. Millennials want to see companies competing for their talent, and that means:

Providing for their needs

Building a comfortable and welcoming work environment

Helping them improve their skill sets and become better overall global citizens

The simpler way to put this is millennials want their workplaces and the people there to function as a kind of second family. They want that company to have an easily graspable and pro-social set of values. They want opportunities to broaden their usefulness to your company, and they want you to help them give back to the community. Again, one would have to squint really hard to get a sense of “entitlement” from any of this — it’s simply what millennials want from business now that business rules the world.

The good news is, there’s really nothing to lose by giving this more social understanding of employment a shot — not when there’s so much in it for you.

To put it another way, millennials feel it when their talents and desire to improve themselves go to waste. It’s a huge reason why millennial tenure in the corporate world tops out at an average of two years.

Let’s revisit the thesis that millennials are needier than older generations in this more complete context and then be honest with ourselves. The problem is not that human beings have “suddenly” become more entitled than previous generations. The problem is corporate culture has, on average, delivered steadily and measurably worse job satisfaction and engagement for decades on end.

That can stop with us. If you’re reading this now, you have no shortage of ways to access information. And if you’re a business leader yourself, it means you can be more direct than ever when it comes to engaging with your workers and finding out what simple changes you can make that could seriously improve their lives and the work they do for you.

Millennials Are High-Maintenance, But They’ll Go The Extra Mile

We recognize that identifying any group of people by generational monikers is a bit reductive, but we did promise millennials tend toward excellence, as a cohort, in the workplace. Researchers are confident in young folks’ desire to “go the extra mile” in just about all of their endeavors. It means putting in extra hours if the job requires it. Need to brush up on or learn a new coding language to get a new site build just right? There are eager young folks out there ready to do just that.

It’s still true that millennials want to feel connected to their places of employment and they want meaningful human relationships there, but they also want space to invest in their family and home lives. Workers throughout Europe put in fewer hours in an average year than Americans. They’ve also literally written laws that, among other things, prevent employers from insisting workers check email after hours. If you can believe it, workers in these countries still come very close to, and in several cases exceed, the productive output of American workers.

Just about every part of modern human life involves some kind of quid pro quo. For millennials, one of the things they wish for in exchange for company loyalty is the sense that the work they do is not, after all, very far removed from the rest of their lives. Even if they’re not in love with the work they do — we can’t all launch top-secret government payloads into orbit — they definitely can be in love with how they do it, where it gets done, and the people they do it with.